Dedication **
By Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin
"Dedication" follows Katie, whose high school sweetheart-turned-rock-star has hit the big time by writing songs about their teenage sexcapades. Katie feels Jake's songs are ruining her life, a flimsy premise for a 400-page novel, since it’s now 15 years post-high school, and Katie moved away from her hometown long ago and no longer travels in circles where anyone would suspect where Jake got his material.
On top of that dumb premise, when Katie learns that Jake has turned up in their home town, she flies there to make him regret using her as his muse. How Katie plans to do this is unclear, but it seems to involve leather boots with kitten heels and black cashmere sweaters.
I realize that chicklit is obligated to “talk about the clothes,” but “Dedication” goes beyond obligation. Open any page of this book and find stuff like this: "I hear a moan escape as he registers that I stand before him in only the white thigh-highs Laura and I painstakingly picked out at Victoria's Secret yesterday."
**SPOILER** Toward the end of the novel, Jake manages to woo Katie back with a big sapphire ring, and they head off to his New York penthouse for three days of the horizontal bop, until Jake's ex-girlfriend's goons show up to strip the place of her stuff, and Jake’s jacked-up personal assistant and publicist starts taking over Katie's life. There is a brief brush with Nicole Kidman as she and Katie try to escape the paparazzi.
And Jake is revealed--to anybody too dumb to see where this is all going--to have devolved from mere manipulative teenager into whackadoo superstar hooked on weird Hollywood diets, health fads and dope.
In their better efforts--“The Nanny Diaries” and “Citizen Girl”--McLaughlin and Kraus have veered into stereotypes that are passably satirical (the Boomer parents, the fashionistas, boyfriends who think with organs other than their brains, etc.).
But "Dedication" doesn't just veer. It crashes and burns.
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